


Afterimage

by tb_ll57



Category: The Song of the Lioness - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Background Relationships, Background Slash, Backstory, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-07
Updated: 2014-03-07
Packaged: 2018-01-14 20:56:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1278553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tb_ll57/pseuds/tb_ll57
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>'My father,' Alex tells his master, 'is dead.'</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Afterimage

It's not unknown for Roger to take late nights in his workshop, but the workshop is the one corner of his master's chambers to which Alex never ventures. It's only reluctantly he goes there now. He stands before the door, looking dully at the sliver of light beneath it. It's a long minute before he can bring himself to knock.

An immediate, irritated reply: 'I told you I was not to be disturbed.'

'My lord,' Alex calls back. 'I only need a moment.'

Locks turning, and the latch glows orange. Roger gazes down at him, inscrutable. 'How unlike you, Squire,' he says, and there is no mistaking that quiet, controlled tone for anything but dire fury. 'I've never had to instruct you in my orders twice.'

'Nor will you have to now.' Far away, the third morning bell tolls. It will be dark a few bells more, but Alex will be gone well before dawn. 'My father,' he tells his master, 'is dead.'

Roger's dark brows draw together. Alex's moment has passed, and twice, three times as much. He nearly turns to go when Roger finally answers him. 'Then you're leaving for Tirragen to take title.'

'Yes, my lord.'

Roger's aubergine brocade gathers all the light, even from his eyes, his pale skin. His fingers brush Alex's cheek. 'I'm sorry. Forgive me my temper. You ride now?'

'It's a week's journey in winter. I'll return as quickly as possible.'

'You'll be needed there--'

'At a crumbling fortress barely the size of the throne room, a few barren orchards.' It's Alex who restrains himself now. 'I'll return as quickly as possible.'

Roger nods once. Then steps forward, as Alex steps back, and closes his workroom behind him. 'I'll join you,' he says. 'Pack my bags as I inform their Majesties. I'll meet you in the stables.'

'My lord--'

'Alex.' Roger's lips touch the same spot his fingers had, just beside his mouth. Alex watches him go, raw and bemused. He has to shake himself before he can move again.

 

**

 

There's no brocade doublets in the saddle. Roger's sable-lined cloak gleams all the same, collecting snow like glittering dew drops. Alex is merely wet and miserable, riding grimly on.

They follow the Great Road East all through the wan daylight, and make camp at the edge of Hill Country. Alex collects kindling from scrub bushes and pine trees; Roger lights it by raising a palm over it and speaking one word of power. Their meal is rabbit, trapped in the snare Alex lays and baked whole in the mud Alex cakes around it, so that when he takes a rock to the fired clay shell, the fur and skin cleave away from the meat. Roger eats it elegantly, wipes grease from his fingers on a linen kerchief that he secrets away in his sleeve. Alex wipes his fingers on his trousers, his mouth on his sleeve. Alex is the one who rubs down their horses, rigs a canvas shelter over them and blankets them warmly against the chill. Roger is the one who lays their bedrolls together. Roger is the one who touches him, the laces of his trousers, the ties of his shirt. Roger is the one who presses deep bruising kisses over his chest, leaves him burning and frozen at once.

If they could fly, they would have made excellent time, but confined to the ground they spend more time riding up and down than forward. The hills go from rolling and broad to steep and hazardous. In deep snow they have to dismount and lead the horses. They lose a day to a blizzard, trapped in a dale without shelter except for Roger's Gift. They spend an early evening at Lake Tirragen, in the ruins of an old stone chapel, so that Alex can fish and Roger can meditate. They don't speak except when necessary, for all that time. If Roger suspects Alex of dawdling, he makes no mention. In truth, the only time Alex hesitates at all is when they climb the final peak, and his childhood home rises grey and unlovely ahead. At first look it's only a particularly rocky hillside, twisted trees and bare stone rising out of a bit of flat plain. The promontory on the far side is the keep, the South Tower with four levels, the square North Tower slowly being robbed of masonry to repair the outer curtain. They're too far to see movement, except for the Tirragen banners, black and purple quarters. Half-staff, barely fluttering in the wind.

Another day's ride would take them to Tusaine. Alex tells himself he doesn't really want to keep riding, but he does. Ride, and ride, and ride, to whatever waited beyond those walls there.

'We can camp,' Roger says. 'If you wish. But I think it will be rather warmer inside.'

'It's fine.' Roger's face is nearly invisible beneath his deep hood. Only his eyes are there, sapphire jewels. Alex avoids them. He shakes his reins sharply, goads his horse to a trot with a brisk dig of his heels.

They're spotted at the bottom of the hill, uninterrupted as they take the winding path up the climb. Only when they near the arched pass are they approached. Alex removes his cap. No-one challenges them as they guide their horses over the wooden bridge; it sounds rotten, he notes absently, like everything else at Tirragen. When they dismount in the sloping courtyard, a boy runs out from the kitchens to take their mounts. He sketches a bow, face blank, the tight curls of his dark hair, the almond slope of his dark eyes marking him as kin. Alex has that hair, those eyes. His father had. The timid, hunch-shouldered woman-- girl-- who watches warily from the big kilns refuses to meet his gaze.

'My lord.' The steward, hoary and white-haired, so frail he walks with two sticks propped under shriveled arms. 'You've missed the burial, Master Alexander.'

If Roger makes any guesses about their unhurried pace then, Alex does nothing to confirm that, either.

'I expect you'll want to see to things while you're home,' the steward adds. 'There's matters could be seen to.'

Matters some thirty years in the waiting. His father wouldn't be mourned here. 'A meal,' Alex says. 'And a warm bath for his Grace, the Duke of Conté.'

Panic. Panic and fluster and fuss, a scurry of servants dashing here and there. The boy goes with their horses, the woman with him. The steward has them into the hall-- such as it is-- to sit by the fire while arrangements are made for them, rooms cleared. His father's quarters, the level above their head and heated, at least, by the hall's great hearth, will go to Roger, the only space fine enough for visiting royal blood. The women's suite will do for Alex, barely big enough for a bed and a washstand and whatever rodents have made the space their own these many years. A man goes flying past with linens.

'You needn't dance attendance on me,' Roger tells him quietly. 'Do what you need to do.'

It's a strange thing, to realise he actually is in position to finally do those things which need to be done. Or rather, that they are now his problems, and will have grown the worse for waiting so long for doing. That, at least, he had known would come. Tirragen had been waiting many long years for its lord to expire.

'He was sickly,' Alex says abruptly. 'A cough. Every winter. Our people-- our people were from the south. Beyond the Great Inland Sea.'

Roger sheds his leather gloves, warms his white hands over the fire, over their buckets of warming bath water. 'The ancient lands of Utica. I know it.'

'You've been there?'

Of course. Roger has been everywhere. Roger has done everything. Roger knows everything.

'You should go someday,' Roger answers. 'I could take you. The remains on the Medjerda River are remarkable. The mosaics--'

Alex knows the mosaics. Knows the sad replicas his ancestors brought with them to Tortall. Roger follows his eyes to the far wall. Missing so many tiles it was almost impossible to make out the pattern. The colours so faded that only ghosts walk the foreign hills of forgotten lands. Eyes as dark as Alex's own stare out of nameless faces.

'My lord. Your Grace.' The steward, a crowd of muddy men carrying trenchers and a table. Shortly Alex and Roger are seated, a moth-eaten cloth is folded carefully over the wood to hide the many darnings, and their meal appears on battered tin masquerading as pewter dishes. Coarse bread, not freshly baked, with slender drippings of honey. Pottage of broad beans, fennel, and beaver tail to bide them over til supper. Almond milk, not wine. Roger, who sups with kings and samples exotic foodstuffs from ancient cities, offers urbane compliments on the rough offering, and eats exactly his portion and no more. Alex eats barely a bite.

The steward retreats to the mosaic to watch them. The servants stationed at the doors watch their feet, not their guests. There is no welcome. It is not a home.

 

**

 

His father's neglect went deeper than Alex knew. Bere the steward oversaw the planting in the final years, but the harvests were small, troubled by poor soil and blight. Alex orders a year of fallow fields to be followed by a year of legume planting only, and knows his people-- his father's people-- are already starving and will starve for years more before their land will yield any surplus. Tirragen's stores won't last that long.

'Rice,' Roger suggests, and Alex hesitates, imagines telling his stubborn, illiterate farmers that a Yamani staple will feed Tortallan bellies just as well as barley and millet. 'With the freshwater lake for irrigation, you'd have rice in one growing season.'

Money. Alex earns enough coin in service to the Crown to sustain himself and little more. Tirragen earns less than that. He frets over the numbers. Mathematics have always been his friend, until now. He scrapes his vellum sheets clean after each calculation, to remove the stark impossibilities from sight.

Roger lifts Alex by the chin. 'Ask me,' he says, and there is a little smile on his red lips. He wears a stiff quilted jerkin of expensive turquoise, his straight soft hair tied with a silk ribbon. Alex chaps his hands riding the fields, testing the ox plows, splitting new planks for the bridge, shoveling fertiliser into loess vats. The differences between them have never been so obvious.

By night, staying late in Roger's rooms, his father's rooms, surrounded by the musty history of slow-wheeling disaster, not even Roger can bring him to pleasure, and when he stutters out please and for my people, Roger only nods and says he can have anything he needs, as if it were ever that easy.

 

**

 

His father's grave is already sunken beneath the weight of snow.

There is no marker. Nor for his mother, a face he no longer remembers. They lie forever separate from the dead of Tirragen, granted their own patch of grass within a rusting iron fence. But the graves around them have names, worn wooden planks and dried flowers, little offerings from families who loved those they lost.

Alex leaves nothing at the site. No-one will leave anything for him.

 

**

 

A man from the village who laid bricks in Galla says there's nothing to be done about the too-old kilns in the bakehouses. Alex rides out beyond the lake to cut sod, and spends a rainy afternoon constructing an oven out of mud and limestone. He lays a bed of flat stones by hand, until Roger, moved by what Alex knows is not compassion, offers to move them by magic. Alex allows it only because he is tired to the bone, and it will mean he can leave sooner. He wants desperately to leave, and the list of tasks his father never completed is finally running out of new items. But then the bricklayer, spooked by Roger's magic, has to be let go, and Roger is short-tempered in the weather, exposed by the open wall of the bakehouse, and Alex does the rest of it alone. Mortar and lining the walls. Roofing the dome. Layering his sod over the top and digging out a trench to be filled back in with ash and embers. The oven is big enough to hold a man of Roger's size. It holds the big stewpot and fourteen loaves and a shelf of oatcakes, and Alex is too weary to eat.

A cook raises him a bucket from the well for washing. He's already drenched, his shirt soaked through, his hands and boots caked in dried clay. He sips it first, enough to relieve his parched throat, and pours the rest over his head, shakes himself like a dog. No-one looking at him would know he's the lord of anything. Roger, dry under the awning of the keep, Roger looks like a lord. His people defer to Roger, not him. And when Roger gives him the coin to feed them all they'll owe Roger what Alex has already given, and more.

A tug at his sleeve. It's the boy, the one he noticed at his arrival. He holds a jug. Cider, gone flat, but a decent pressing nonetheless, the first fine thing he's had at Tirragen. He drinks all but the last few swallows, to let the boy have a taste. Their skin is exactly the same shade, the deep brown of the clay baking on Alex's oven. Alex's father had been dark like them, and his grandfather and grandfather's father, too. It bred true in all their line.

The kitchen girl stands, hand to her mouth, afraid to interfere. She will not flee with Alex sees her there, but twists away, ashamed.

Alex will leave what little coin of his own he has with the boy. There's no privilege here to be shared, and it would not be a generous thing to acknowledge his father's by-blows. Escape is all Alex has to offer-- it's all he's ever wanted, all he can imagine they might want from him.

Roger gives the boy a purse, as well, when he thinks Alex isn't looking. It makes Alex's stomach shrink and ache. Roger rubs his big hand over the boy's wild hair, and Alex has to twist away, himself.

 

**

 

They've been at Tirragen four weeks when Roger must return to Corus. Alex has run out of things to repair, or nearly. Roger promises the rice will be sent for, as soon as they're back in the capitol. If they hurry, it might arrive in time for spring planting. Alex will have to return for that, can't trust the farmers to build the proper terraces without supervision.

Roger doesn't touch him on the ride back. Alex goes to him, unable to bear it. Roger gives him a cool smile, and tells him to strip himself.

Roger rides on to the palace alone, leaving Alex at the gate. Alex goes to the markets, to arrange interim supplies, to the scribes, to have them register his title, to the inns, to drink. He drinks until he's ejected from the first and again at the second. By the fourth he's weaving on his feet, doesn't read the name, just follows the sign for ale, commoner's drink, heavy and rank. A chesty ginger-head in a low-cut gown finds him his own table, finds his purse for him, orders him a meal instead of alcohol. She finds him a bed, perhaps her bed, but he's drunk and sloppy and knows it won't be pleasant for either of them. Still, he sleeps better that night than in a month. When he staggers down the creaking stairwell in the morning, she tells him her name is Rispah and he's welcome to return when he can feel it.

'I'm not...' he says, and he can't, feel it, can't feel her fingers curled familiarly, skillfully at his crotch, can't feel anything. Anything.

'Ah,' she hums, and lets him go with a wink. 'Then come back to talk. We can be lonely in all kinds of ways, isn't that so.' And gives him back his purse, none the lighter, not even for the wasted effort. He almost agrees, on the strength of that. But once he's on his horse again, riding for the palace again, he knows he won't return there. It's over.

He's been gone long enough that people seek him out. Gary is first, and then Raoul; even Alan and his cat come by. Palace servants, ever so much more efficient than Tirragen's, have kept Roger's rooms, unpacked Roger's bags, so there's nothing to be done there. There's even a meal laid for them, richer by three than Tirragen's lordly best. Fresh-roasted capons in dates and pomegranate, tart of salmon and fig, sweet whey cheese and biscuits stamped with the palace seal. He leaves it for Roger, already locked into his workroom.

Roger is the last to seek him out, after night has fallen and there is no light left but pinpoints dancing on candle wicks. Alex sits in a delicate wooden chair, his shirt off, one boot dropped to the floor, no energy to accomplish the rest. Roger stands over him for a moment-- Roger, in handsome midnight velvet piped in gold, Roger with sleek dark hair and beard, lips as red as if rouged-- Roger stands over him and says, 'I'm sorry for your loss, Alex.'

'Are you,' he replies.

Roger tugs him up by the wrist, pulls him close. They stand there almost like dance partners, then closer even, chest to chest, Roger's hand spread wide over the small of his back. Roger bends to kiss him, presses those red lips to Alex's gently, as if to caress him, as if to court him. Alex is not a fool, and he doesn't believe that. But when Roger whispers, 'Come to bed,' Alex does.


End file.
